The bulk of the business end of my week Monday 10 to Sunday 16 September 2012 was spent at Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 event on the Gold Coast, and the weekend at Parramatta.

Microsoft’s event, like all major vendor conferences, began with an intense burst of frustration thanks to the inevitable series of overly-long overly-staged buzzword-saturated propaganda events — “keynotes”, the industry has decided to call them — designed to hammer the new technology’s marketecture into your head while preventing the opportunity for critical thinking.

And, like nearly all others, it eventually settled down into something sensible once all the vice-presidents and managing directors and pointlessly-animated PowerPoint presentations and bass-heavy music had been stage-managed out of the room and actual engineers and designers and other geeks started talking through specific details.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course.

Parramatta, by comparison, delivered a delightful spring weekend full of ducklings and food and wine and almost no pretension whatsoever.

I’ll have more to say about that in due course also.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 154, “Good-guy hackers and other infosec anomalies”. A conversation with Michael Montecillo, a threat research and intelligence principal with IBM Security Services, covering good-guy hackers (well der!), click fraud, his views on the profile of hacktivism following the arrest of key Anonymous and LulzSec members, and more.

Media Appearances

On Tuesday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin, but it wasn’t recorded my end so I can’t bring it to you today. That’s a remarkable similar statement to last week, except that one was a pre-record with Richard Margetson and this one was live with Kate O’Toole. I’m annoyed that the recording didn’t happen, ‘cos I managed to give a coherent exposition of my thoughts about online bullying.

Corporate Largesse

Microsoft covered my airfares from Sydney to the Gold Coast and return, airport transfers, three nights accommodation at Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino on Broadbeach Island, and all the food and drinks.

The conference backpack was a high-quality Targus job, containing marketing material from sponsors and other vendors. The former I’ve kept, because my The North Face backpack is starting to wear out. All the latter I’ve thrown into the recycling bin, unread.

Also:

On Monday evening I attended the SANS Sydney Community Event “Your Security Monitoring — An Attacker’s Perspective”, where the food and (soft)drinks were sponsored by Shearwater Solutions. An article about this will appear in due course.

I’ll be heading from Sydney to Wentworth Falls this afternoon (Monday) and will return to Sydney for the school holiday period on the coming weekend. I also plan to be in Sydney on Wednesday morning for Symantec’s announcement of their Australian expansion plans. How will that turn into an accommodation schedule? I’ll figure that out this evening.

[Photo:Ducks at Parramatta, a delightfully pastoral scene photographed on the banks of the Parramatta River on Saturday afternoon. I managed to get quite close to this family of ducks before they raised the alarm and took to the water.]

WordPress for blogging more generally, though of course there are others.

Any number of tools for posting photos and other images, but I mentioned Flickr and Twitpic.

YouTube is the gorilla in the room for posting video, but there’s also services for live video streaming such as Ustream and Livestream. The latter even works as a video switching service in the cloud.

“You’re going to get phone calls after this, Richard, from plenty of people who say ‘No, no, no, use something else. You can get into kind of religious wars about this sort of thing, and it’ll all be out of date by November,” I said. Which is true, but I still might write an article talking about this in more detail some time.

Apple wants Samsung to take eight mobile models off the market after it won a landmark patent case against Samsung over the design of its mobile phones. Apple was awarded $1.5 billion in damages and now has the exclusive rights to pinch-and-zoom gestures on their touch-screen technologies.

Patent law is intended to reward innovation but with companies engaged in patent turf wars this case highlights how patents may inhibit innovation instead.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — leaving out all of the most important bits.

I can’t tell you about the highly personal things that happened last week, except to say that something which had been gnawing at the very core of my being has… changed. And my mind is still adjusting. As is my shoulder, which continues to misbehave. But codeine is dealing with that. Again.

The tooth situation is being resolved, though. Stage one of the root canal work has been performed.

I can also tell you about the nauseatingly young-and-in-love hipsters, pictured above, with their matching skateboards and matching sneakers. Well, that’s all I want to tell you about them, or I’ll get cranky.

So with the linkage…

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 108, “Adobe’s long battle with security flaws”. A conversation with Brad Arkin, Adobe’s head of product security and privacy.

What’s embarrassing listening back to it today is that I’d completely missed the significance of Siri, the combination of voice recognition and artificial intelligence that creates personal assistant far more sophisticated than mere voice-control of the phone.

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